Metadata is data that characterizes data. Metadata exists in many different places within an enterprise. Current systems to capture metadata tend to focus on metadata related to a specific segment of metadata within an organization. For example, independent silos of metadata are often created by databases, modeling tools, Extract Transform Load (ETL) tools, and Business Intelligence tools. These tools lead to a proliferation of metadata, duplicate metadata, and different representations of the metadata. To overcome this problem, products have been introduced to integrate metadata into a single metadata repository. Thus, a single metadata repository includes metadata from various data sources. However, there are still ongoing challenges to using this metadata in an effective manner. That is, there are ongoing challenges in processing metadata in a metadata repository so as to find relationships between objects in the metadata repository. In addition, there are ongoing challenges to effectively characterizing the impact and lineage of objects in a metadata repository.
In view of the foregoing, it would be desirable to provide improved techniques for processing metadata in a metadata repository.